Ashen Knight
by Ajohnstone1
Summary: The Ashen Knights are a Space Marine Chapter tasked with the grim duty of iconoclasm. When their secret shame is revealed to them, it falls to Reclusiarch and acting Lord-Marshal Ulysses Invictus to lead his Chapter against foes within and without. His journey takes him from the soils of Holy Terra to the very depths of the Eye of Terror in his search of redemption
1. Prologue

Prologue: Censure

"What?!"

The blow was not entirely unexpected, but wholly unprepared for. Cawl was sent sprawling, his legs unable to find purchase on the smooth tile of the laboratory.

"You mean to tell me you disobeyed the one limit I placed on you?" Guilliman thundered, "you ignored my warning?"

"I did," Cawl vocalised defiantly, "the gene stock is not flawed, the Primarchs were." Guilliman drove the Hand of Dominion into one of the consoles, crushing it in a shower of sparks and groaning metal.

"And you thought you could hide this from me?" He growled, his eyes colder and harder than any of the machinery that was part of the Magos.

"Negative, there was only a 0.0000001 per cent chance that you would not discover this labour," Cawl said, his vocaliser robbing his voice of any emotion it may have had, "trying to ensure your ignorance for an indefinite period would be a vain effort. Instead priority was given to finishing the project before you were made aware of it."The Primarch growled, grabbing the Magos by the throat with the Hand of Dominion. Metal groaned in protest as the steel augmetics bent under the pressure. One squeeze was all the Lord Commander would need to destroy the wayward scientist.

Guilliman leaned close, so close his breath clouded Cawl's retinal lenses. His face was a mask of fury. If ever anyone present, only Cawl's retainers and assistants, had seen anything more terrifying they could not remember it.  
"Give me a list," he snarled.

Four hours later Guilliman had pored over the list multiple times. It made for grim reading. Cawl had already made chapters from the geneseed of all the Traitor Legions, and even the Lost Primarchs, though he had already dispatched forces to deal with those particular heresies.

"Lord, are you well?" Calgar's voice interrupted the Primarch's bitter reverie. He hadn't realised that he was rubbing his temples.

"I am fine Calgar, thank you," he sighed, "we have to deal with these chapters. The Lost Legions' successors need eradicating, no doubt, but I think if we can control the traitors' then they may serve the Imperium as well as any other Chapter, maybe better."

"I feel like you have reservations," Calgar pointed out, earning a chuckle from Guilliman.

"Very astute of you, chapter master," Guilliman nodded, "look at this list. Tell me which you trust least."

"Well, I don't trust any of these..." he trailed off, and Guilliman knew he was seeing what he saw, "Throne of Terra."

"Exactly. They even fight the same way as their forebears," Guilliman dropped his head into his hands, rubbing his temples again, "can I rely on you to deal with this?"

"It will be done, Lord."


	2. Chapter 1: Ashes of the Fall

Chapter 1: Ashes of the Fall

The Cathedral was wondrous. Gold was used more often than wood and it shone bright in the evening sun. A glyph hung above the creamy marble altar, a great burst if sunlight forged from gold. This was the centre of the world for the people on this planet, these people who escaped from the Imperial Creed for ten thousand years.

Reclusiarch Ulysses of the Ashen Knights stepped through the shattered mahogany doors, his black and gunmetal armour taking on a warm tone in the yellow sunlight glinting off the gold. He had been in other Cathedrals, temples, chapels and places of worship on this planet, but none this size. The aisle was wide enough to drive a baneblade down without touching a pew, and the sanctuary could house a battle titan comfortably. Great columns of creamy marble rose periodically along the length of the nave, each as thick as a man was tall, and at the back of the sanctuary, behind the altar, rose a black marble font.

He stepped forward, and behind him his Primaris Marines filtered into the magnificent building. They cleared it quickly and professionally, dragging men in plain white robes and women in embroidered black gowns from the ancillary chambers and alcoves by their hair at first, and then they herded normal men and women out at the point of their bolt rifles when they started descending into the catacombs. They moved with cold, practiced efficiency, their guns trained on the kneeling civilians. Many of the citizens cried, or screamed, and one even roared accusations questioning the Astartes' parentage. That woman was met with the butt of a bolt rifle for her trouble.

The Reclusiarch strode up to the sanctuary, admiring the craftsmanship of the cathedral. It was much less oppressive than the Ecclesiarchy's halls of worship. There were no skulls, weeping angels, nor images of death. There were no oppressive chants. The gold was not tarnished and dulled with age. The atmosphere was not one of fear, and gloom, and hate. There were golden sunbeams and flowers, blossoms lining the balconies, and frescoes of angels and faces raised in adoration. Filtering out the noise of his men, Ulysses could hear soft singing to a gentle melody. The whole church looked lovingly maintained, the golds polished, the marble clean, the wood gleaming. This was a place of hope and charity. He cast his eye back at the people kneeling in the aisle. Aside from the obvious clergy, no man or woman wore better than peasant's clothes, and many wore ragged burlap. These were the planet's poorest, seeking sanctuary in their deity's arms. Unfortunately for them no god could stay the Imperium's wrath.

A flicker of movement caught Ulysses' eye, and his Absolver Pattern Bolt Pistol was in his hand in a heartbeat. From the northernmost apse came a small, hunched old man. He wore a great red gown, and his face was covered in a simple bronze mask. It was carved, Ulysses assumed, to be akin to the face beneath it.

"Is there anyone else here?" Ulysses asked, his voice a synthetic growl. An Ork Warboss had torn his bottom jaw off, and now the bottom half of his face was covered by a respirator and vocaliser worked into the likeness of a skull.

"No, my lord," the old man said, desperation in his eyes, "please, this is a place of peace! The war ended three days ago! We are unarmed!"

"Good."

Ulysses' pistol barked, and the priest's head exploded onto the wall behind him. In the nave, the Intercessors' bolt rifles roared, and the shrieks of the mortals' horror and pain echoed throughout the grand cathedral. "Reclusiarch," the vox crackled, "the catacombs are clear. Your orders?"

Ah, orders. Ulysses never expected that he would be the one to command the field of battle. He was the spiritual head of the chapter, the heart of their beliefs. But alas, the Lord-Marshal had fallen in battle thirteen months ago, and Ulysses was named interim Lord-Marshal until a new one could be appointed. "How old are the catacombs?" Ulysses asked, staring over the bloodshed pooling on the marble floor.

"Rough estimate is M32, my lord."

M32. Remarkable. Only a millennia after the Horus Heresy, and years after the Primaris Space Marines were first devised. The same time that Lord Guilliman was laid low by the traitor Fulgrim. It had endured for nine thousand years, while Ulysses and his Chapter had only been active for a hundred. His Chapter were little more than a teardrop in the rain next to this monument to peace and faith.  
"Plant your demolition charges and then return to the surface," he ordered, taking one last look at the beautiful fresco. He turned to the exit and strode down the nave, overseeing his warriors burning books and scrolls, and planting melta-bombs on the marble columns.

"Why are you doing this?" A woman gasped, a pool of blood between her and her arm. Ulysses fixed her with his cold grey eyes for but a moment, silently assessing her. He then turned towards the sergeant.

"Sergeant Iskavan. Why is it speaking?"

"My apologies, my lord," the sergeant saluted sharply, fist over his primary heart, and then shot the woman through the eye, "it will not happen again."

"Take your squad to the pain deck for ten hours," Ulysses nodded, "and see that it does not."

The sergeant, suitably punished, nodded and returned to his duties. Before long the squad in the catacombs returned, and both squads exited the Cathedral. Ulysses nodded to his sergeants, and they thumbed their detonators.

The demolition charges detonated first, ripping apart the kilometres of tunnels underneath the cathedral and collapsing the nine millennia old burial site, and several sections of the building above even before the melta-bombs immolated the columns. With a sound akin to the wrath of a god, the roof collapsed, followed by the walls. The planet's records claimed it took two hundred years to build the Cathedral. It was destroyed in less than half an hour. The dust had not settled when Ulysses was aboard one of the Repulsors, on the move to the great library.

Such was the duty of the Ashen Knights: iconoclasm. Warriors went from building to building, door to door, dragging people out by the hair if need be, and destroying all religious and cultural symbols within. Resistance was met with brutality, and questions with red eye lenses and silence. Bodies lined the streets, and the gutters were full of swirling crimson blood. Conservative estimates placed the death toll in the hundred thousands, according to the vox. Cold, methodical reports from sergeants filtered in listening areas cleared, and a steady stream of updates filtered from the servitors listing deaths.

"Ulysses!" The vox crackled with distance. But even through the static corruption the whining, nasally voice was recognisable. The ministorum preacher.

"Reclusiarch to you, mortal," Ulysses said, his synthetic monotone carrying his threat well enough, "what do you want?"

"Why are you destroying the churches?"

"It is our duty."

"Can't you just destroy the symbols and the texts? The buildings are magnificent and with a little modification they may be suitable for the Adeptus Ministorum's usage!"

"Our duty is to destroy cultures that do not align with the Imperium's own. It is not our duty to bow and scrape before you."

"I will declare you Excommunicant Traitoris if you do not abide by our custom!" The preacher wailed. Ulysses could almost imagine the wobbling of that man's chins. "I will have you hunted down by the Adepta Sororitas! The Officio Assassinorum!"

"You can send whoever you wish, preacher, I will send them back to you in pieces. Be gone. And if you disrupt me or my warriors I will give them free reign to fire on you." The link severed. The library drew near. A great glass pyramid. Inside was the accumulated knowledge, lore and mythology of the world. It had to be destroyed.

"Hostiles front. Encountering resistance," the vox reported, the telltale thudding of bolter fire in the background, "locals employing psykers again."

Ah, resistance. It was true that this was a planet devoted to wisdom and peace, an abnormal number of of the population were mutants (around 30%). While the majority of those were monsters, approximately fifteen percent of the mutants were psykers that formed the ruling caste and armed forces of the world. The ruling caste had been forcibly removed from power already, and now the reaper's blade was to fall on the remnants of the military. The Repulsors sped toward the pyramid, cannons roaring. Great shards of glass fell onto the lines of psykers. Strange energies swirled around them, bolts of multi-hued fire burst off the hulls, blackening their steel.

"Lord Ulysses! Repulsor III reports it has boarders," the pilot called from his cockpit. Ulysses heard that too. He nodded to himself and climbed into the turret.

Flinging the hatch open, Ulysses was hit with the cool evening breeze. The pyramids were shining orange, and it looked like the city was burning down in the reflection. Fitting. He racked the slide on the Ironhail Heavy Stubber, the throaty clunk of the gun loading one of its massive rounds satisfyingly familiar. He swung to the right, and sure enough Repulsor III was crawling with mutant degenerates. Ulysses wanted to curl his lip. He would if he had lips. The Ironhail opened up, roaring The Emperor's fury at the boarders. They dropped onto the ground with wet thumps and chunks missing.

"Thank you Reclusiarch," the pilot voxed, his voice calm and measured. The Repulsors opened up at the psyker line, obliterating chunks of it at a time. The library fell within an hour, and within a week the Adeptus Administratum had arrived to claim their bounty. Within a month the world had become homogeneous with the rest of the Imperium, and within a year there was no one alive who remembered the native culture of their homeworld.

The Ashen Knights left after only a day, once they had built a statue of the Emperor Triumphant to give thanks for their victory.


	3. Chapter 2: Revelation

"Lord," one of the serfs called from their station, "warp signatures! A dozen of them!"

"All hands, battle stations!" Askaris called out, his voice impassive. He sat in the command throne, perfectly serene despite the clamouring alarums. His eyes were focused, processing the vast amounts of data spilling from various screens about him. He was the Voidmaster, commander of the Ashen Knights' crusading fleets. He made Voidmaster into more than just a title, he truly was master of death in the great black sea.

Reclusiarch Ulysses meanwhile was standing above him on an observation gantry. He was gripping the handrails so tight that he did not realise he had bent them out of shape. He hated void warfare, absolutely hated it. He could dictate the flow of a battle between hordes of infantry and armour. He could lead any God-Emperor fearing warriors into the jaws of hell without fear or hesitation. He could crush the life from the mightiest of the Emperor's enemies with his bare hands if needs be. But in the void, he was as useless as a newborn. He never had the patience to learn the slow dance of the black. So he stood, waiting for the chance to get in a boarding pod and fight how space marines were meant to.

Around him stood the other important members of the Chapter command. To his left stood Kor Lavados, the Librarian. He was taller than even many Primaris Space Marines, yet without any greater bulk. This gave him a very thin appearance when standing next to his fellow warriors. His helmet was on his belt, his desert tanned skin and braided black hair on show. Ulysses never liked his eyes. His eyes were strange and swirling, the colour of the iris dancing from blue to green to violet and back. It was unnatural and unnerving.

"You're staring again, brother," Kor Lavados said, smirking.

"Your eyes bother me," Ulysses grunted as he realised he was right. The librarian chuckled, covering his face with his helmet.

"I've explained it before," said the Hospitaller on Ulysses' right, "it was a byproduct of the geneseed and psychic powers mixing in a Primaris Marine. It isn't harmful."

It was not very smart to taunt Elikos, as Hospitaller, but it did not stop anyone - there were plenty of peculiarities to taunt. He was youthful, despite his station. What really set him apart though, was his hair. The geneseed turned most brothers' hair jet black, but Elikos had blonde hair. He kept it short, so it was not too noticeable he would say, and yet because most warriors wore their hair quite long, in the end it was even more noticeable.

"I could replace them with augmetics," Morthus Rei rumbled from beside Elikos, cracking a joke to the astonishment of his fellows, "then they could be whatever colour you desire." The Technomancer. Morthus Rei must have seemed like a dreadnought to any mortal who talked to him. He towered over the other Primaris marines, part bionics and part genetics. He was never seen without his helmet and many wondered if he could take it off. Three eye lenses glowed a sickly green from his helm, in contrast to the red of everyone else's. There were whispers of experiments being done by Kor Lavados and Morthus Rei, though what they were, none could, or wanted to say.

On the occulus the void had split, tendrils of colour and formless entities softly spilling out into realspace. The guns of the Ashen Knights' fleet were all primed and ready. Whatever came through to challenge them would taste death. Out of the roiling hell of the warp came ships. A dozen ships, all Astartes pattern. Strike Cruisers mainly, and various different chapter colours and iconographies could be seen in this flotilla. Leading them was a blue and gold battle barge, a proud ultima on its flanks. The Primogenitors had come. "Stand down all ships!" Askaris yelled, rapidly adjusting his parameters.

"No," Ulysses growled from the gantry, "do not stand down yet. Something is not right."

"Aye, Reclusiarch," the Voidmaster nodded, "belay that last."

"Lord," the Comms serf called out, "we're being hailed."

"Open the channel," Ulysses said, his eyes fixed on the armada forming up opposite his own.

The occulus shifted, a face resolving. It was aged, but mighty. It had the quality of a silverback: scarred, aged, but still in the prime of its life. A steely eye and a glowing crimson bionic cast their gaze around the bridge, lip curling at what he saw. "Who among you do you name as Chapter Master?" Marneus Calgar asked disdainfully.

"I am," Ulysses said, releasing the buckled, bent, and crushed railing to stand up straight.

"Then assemble your chapter on the world below."

"The world below is already cleansed. Deploying to it is a waste of the God Emperor's resources." Ulysses said, biting back his thoughts about this exchange being the same.

"I am not asking you," Calgar growled, "the Lord Commander wishes me to speak to you."

"Then speak," Ulysses snarled, his patience expended. He did not answer to the Lord Macragge.

"You are henceforth stripped of the right to claim worlds or territory, and you will be under constant scrutiny to ensure the purity of your actions," Calgar intoned solemnly, the weight of his words not lost on anyone present, "let it be known that you are disgraced, and will be supervised by a squad from one of the primogenitor chapters. You shall crusade until your shame is expunged. This is done under the authority of the Lord Commander." The bridge erupted into noise. Some wept, some wailed and some raged. Every Primaris marine on the bridge save one was roaring at the occulus. Some roared obscenities to the heavens, some roared challenges or oaths of revenge at the Ultramarine. Only Ulysses stood silent, gripped in cold fury.

"What shame?" He snarled through gritted teeth. He was slowly clenching and releasing his fists.

"Shame of lineage," Calgar replied, his words measured, "you are the spawn of Belisarius Cawl's misguided experiments with foul geneseed. you," the Lord Macragge's voice dropped to a snarl, "bear the heritage of the XVII Legion."

Everyone fell silent in shock. No one said a word. The Astartes were stunned, staring off into the middle distance as their minds tried to make sense of what they had heard. The mortals all gazed about the bridge in fear of their masters. Ulysses seethed. His chapter was paying for crimes they did not commit, crimes of their forebears. Had he lips they would curl, but he settled for glaring at Lord Macragge.

"So be it," he snarled, static corruption lacing his speech, "send who you will. Then leave us. I need to tend to my brothers."

Calgar nodded, and the link severed. Ulysses hung his head with a sigh. The menials down below slowly got back to doing their jobs, the hubbub of the bridge gradually returning. Lavados turned and walked from the bridge without a word, his eyes blank. Morthus Rei reported that he was required in the armoury, made the sign of the Aquila, which Ulysses and Elikos returned, and stomped from the bridge. His mechatendrils uncurled from his back, quivering in fury as he went.

Ulysses remained on the bridge, watching as the Primogenitor fleet left. He was not aware of how long he stood there gazing into the great black sea, watching the starts twinkling on either side of the dancing, bruised red-violet line of the Cicatrix Maledictum until a neophyte reported that it was time for evening mass. "See that Adrenus does it in my stead," He replied slowly, his voice faraway. He did not tear his eyes from the void. "If he is to be my replacement he should know how to do it." They were not far away from the Great Rift. On a galactic scale it was only a subsector away from them. There was a noble and noteworthy place to crusade. There they could regain honour and nobility. They were on the galactic eastern fringe, just outside of the Emperor's realm. It would be a short sail to the Cicatrix itself, and from there they could push through until they were past it. They could bring the Emperor's Light beyond the Rift.

His thoughts darkened. His parent Legion thought the same thing. They faced similar chastisement, and they, in their weakness, betrayed the Holy Emperor. The Ashen Knights would not be found wanting when faced with the same trial. Ulysses gripped the token around his neck, a small brass Aquila on a chain, and offered a quiet prayer to the Emperor. In his heart, in his soul, he felt that the universe was standing still for a moment, and he knew that when it started moving again there would be no going back.


End file.
